MOCA Geffen Contemporary

The exhibitor list for this year’s LA Art Book Fair is very very long. So while I’d like to be able to say that this is a definitive top 10 list of booths to see, I can’t quite boast that. This is not a comprehensive list, rather, this is a highly subjective list, and as such, is skewed towards photography publications, publishers that I’m already familiar with (full disclosure: I’m married to an artist who has been featured in publications from Lodret Vandret and Conveyor Arts), and, most importantly, affordable imprints. I purposefully didn’t include any of...
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Most of the rituals of living life are laid bare in the Museum of Contemporary Art's retrospective of Mike Kelley at the Geffen. Traumas bubble up from the basement of our pasts. Memory is found to be faulty and capable of being reorganized by desire. Patterns of life held dear today are found to have disturbing origins in history of violence and exploitation. All delivered with laughter, diabolical and absurd, the kind that comes from camp's exaggeration and annihilation of form. Kelley was raucous and uncontainable until the very end. He refused to be ruled. He refused to praise blindly. He stud...
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To borrow a thought from Deleuze and Guattari, art is not chaos, but a composition of chaos that makes possible a wide range of unpredictable new emotions and ideas. It pushes at the borders of the imagination, inviting new ways of seeing, and sharping our capacities for critical reflection. Truly powerful art may even change how we perceive our world, and re-situate our agency within it.
The Mike Kelley retrospective (currently on view at LA MoCA), reminds me of a quote by filmmaker David Lynch: "...blue skies, picket fences, green grass. cherry trees. It was a dream world -- Middle America a...
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Let's be honest here.
Fuck art fairs. Long live art book fairs.
This weekend Printed Matter opens the first ever LA Art Book Fair. This is important. I want you to go.
Art books are generally everything you wanted art to be but you can actually afford it.
I don't know how much Laura Owen's paintings are going for, more than I make a year or five it's safe to assume, but her book, Fruits and Nuts is available at Ooga Booga for $500; each is its own unique beauty, handmade with love by the artist.
Art books from silkscreened zines to the 10,000-copy museum catalogue carry a spectrum and knowl...
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Like the notorious Banksy, it was an Englishman, Winston Churchill, who once said, history is written by the victors. Wandering through “Art in the Streets” currently on view at MoCA’s Geffen, this old saying seemed especially relevant. In just over a week, this retrospective of loosely defined “street art” that spans over forty years, is already experiencing record attendance, intense publicity, and, along with its very existence at a major contemporary art museum, it might all conspire to prove what appears to be the show’s main thesis: street art is the most important movement in visual cul...
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At first, it is somewhat hard to believe that The Problem Perspective exhibition at MOCA is a retrospective of one artist’s work. While Martin Kippenberger ceased to leave a medium untouched – his work ranges from sculpture to painting to books to illustrations – he did manage to work within the incredibly broad theme of “self-portraiture.” Upon entering Martin Kippenberger’s retrospective at MOCA, the viewer is greeted by a large installation of what initially appears to be birch wood – soon however we realize that it is simply prints creating the texture of the wood. There is an aspect of illusion...
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For his first American retrospective, the New York and Amsterdam based artist Lawrence Weiner approached the Geffen Contemporary as a “fairground,” and produced with curators Ann Goldstein and Donna De Salvo an exhibition that mines Conceptual Art’s relationship to theatricality. This exhibition, it seems, could be at home nowhere else but here; not since Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses planted themselves on the Geffen’s floor has this space felt so right for contemporary art and its content so effectively tied to the warehouse’s baroque interior logic. Weine...
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I want to briefly describe the opening for the Allan Kaprow exhibition, Art as Life, now on view at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo. I also want to say that for most people who go to gallery or museum openings often, or even just sometimes, it has probably long since become expected that, at openings, people aren't looking at the work. Most likely what they are doing instead is socializing. This is okay, especially at a Kaprow opening. In fact it seems to be much more in line with the non-art, un-artist stance that he promoted.
But then go figure; inside of Allan Kaprow: Art a...
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